There

SystemCockpit

Although the System Cockpit is essential for doing many of the more interesting things with the ThereClient, you do need to be aware of some things. First, there is the risk that you might damage your installation of the ThereClient. Please, don’t even think about blaming anyone but yourself if that happens.

Secondly, at least one person has claimed that enabling the System Cockpit crashed his computer. You should save any work in progress before trying this for the first time.

Lastly, one There staff member has (while telling people how to enable the System Cockpit) claimed en passant that it leaves your client open to potential attacks from random people on the internet. Thus far, observations have indicated that you can’t connect to the ThereClient server from another computer because at least in V2.04, the client binds TCP port 9999 only on the 127.0.0.1 interface rather than on all interfaces. Nevertheless, you may want to be wary of using it unless you are behind some kind of firewall as this behaviour might change.

Overview

The ThereClient that you run while you are “in There” has the ability to present a large amount of functionality over and above the normal business of walking around and paintballing your chums. This additional functionality is made available when you enable the SystemCockpit on your ThereClient, also known as “debug mode”.

To enable the System Cockpit, start up the ThereClient in the usual way, then press Ctrl+Shift+L (mnemonic: Local server). That is to say: while holding down the left Ctrl and Shift keys, tap the letter L key. You won’t see any change in the display as a result of performing this, so it is hard to tell if you have done it right.

OpenQuestion: Is there a permanent way (or a command line option) to enable the System Cockpit so that you don’t need to type Ctrl+Shift+L every time?

Now, fire up a browser either from the in-client browser option or by leaving full screen mode and starting Internet Explorer manually. Browse to the following URL: http://localhost:9999/ (or http://127.0.0.1:9999/).

If you have enabled it correctly, you should see a pink screen called “There System Cockpit” with a large number of probably incomprehensible options (“uhost services”) underneath. If something else happens, such as a “host does not exist” or “cannot connect” kind of message from Internet Explorer, you probably forgot to type Ctrl+Shift+L in the client, or mistyped it. Go back into the client and type Ctrl+Shift+L again and browse to http://localhost:9999/ again.